The Solar Eclipse

Over the hot sidewalk two flickering birds perch. Both spot the morsel wriggling and they lurch off the wire beaks first. Grappling with the head and the tail, they tear the grub in two; then the birds, black as perpetual sorrow, bend their necks to the sun, swallow, and croak a short lament of unbearable regret. Hearing the sound, the worms move deeper underground, swallowing along the earth until they nudge into each other, and make the muscular love that worms do.
Back on the surface, the ravens, having returned to the wire, shake their heads disconsolately and move from feet to feet.

I’m waiting for a bus that is late. I have sat patiently for fifteen minutes, ten more than I should have, but it’s obvious that the public transport system simply doesn’t give a fuck how long I have to wait. A young, listless man hobbles past, throwing anxious glances up at the sky. His face is cratered and he reeks of an amphetamine habit. His hair is scraggly and his ridiculously big, Looney Toons t-shirt is soaked with sweat, stuck to his wiry frame so that I can count his ribs. His white legs march to a delirious beat. He disappears around the corner of a church.
A few moments later, an unwieldy woman clocks past on three-inch pumps, dressed all in red and juggling numerous shopping bags. She also looks around uneasily, faltering on her heels like she’s walking on a bowling ball.
I’m trying to maintain a certain amount of composure. I’ve made a thin line of my mind, which I creep along slowly, like a tightrope walker. I have spent the last fifteen minutes watching the pallid man sitting next to me on the bench hopelessly try to bring a musk flavoured Lifesaver up to his mouth, but he never quite gets there. He drools onto his jumper. In an opiated dream he is pressed against the elephant’s textured flank; the grey landscape of its hide taking slow, ponderous breaths, his cheek flush against those gigantic bellows and he is breathing it all in. He has spilt a chocolate drink onto his t-shirt.
I check my watch, tap my feet and glance down the road to where my bus should be coming from.

A man wearing his shirt tucked into his shorts, in beautiful, Italian-made shoes, strides past. As he does, he says cheerfully, ‘Bus Drivers strike!’ And high fives me with his eyebrows, continuing along his way beneath the green canopy of Plane trees that lead through into the city. Too upbeat for his own good.
Then the woman in heels clip-clops back with her bags. She is wearing a short, red coat with red stockings and her pumps are red. A head case; a colour obsessive. Her cleavage pours out of her coat, and I can’t stop looking at it. She nearly splits her dress sitting down between the junkie and me, crossing her long legs in my favour. She glances at the road, then observes the other guy and his Lifesavers, then she turns to me and asks if I have a cigarette.
I hand her one and light it for her. She inhales deeply and blows out a sail that drifts across to the other side of the street.
‘Thank you, I’ve been wanting one for hours.’
Red has no make up on.
‘Doesn’t the light look funny? Polarised.’ She looks around.
She gestures with her cigarette at the other guy, ‘he’s having a good time isn’t he?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Are you friends with him?’
‘No. I don’t mix in those kinds of circles.’
‘Well, listen to you…’
She waves the cigarette at me and smiles, her elbow on her knee.
‘Have you ever tried to help out a junkie?’ She asks.
‘Not intentionally, no.’
‘I have. They hate having their addiction pointed out to them. They’d rather you felt sorry for them being down on their luck than admit to having a habit.’
‘Who cares, they’re just shit.’
She unstraps an eyebrow and cracks it, telling me to back off with the negative vibes.
‘I’ll bet you it’s pride. Stupid pride. You could be the most disgusting thing in the neighbourhood, but pride will still make you think you’re better than you are. Not very compassionate, are you?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I see you’re looking at my legs. Are you having as good a time as they are?’
‘You forgot to put on make up,’ I tell her.
‘Oh, I like the natural look,’ she says, shaking her red mane.
‘Where are you going, dressed like that?’
‘Dressed like what?’
‘Like that. You’re not wearing very much.’
She weighs up which one to give me and shrugs, glancing down, ‘this is just the way I dress. What do you think of it?’
‘It’s indecent.’
‘Yes, I feel great when I’m dressed right.’
‘You should have red lipstick on, then. To complete the picture.’
‘I thought about it, but figured that it would be tacky.’
‘I can see how people would think that.’
I feel the fear that I may posses the last working brain left on this planet. And it’s not in good shape, let me tell you.

My legs are tired of waiting; they protest and send the following signals:
Hey Brain!
What’s going on up there, Brain?
What’s with all the sitting-around?
You think this is natural sitting down thinking all the time?
You gotta get up, man! You gotta move! Moving is what it’s all about!

Moving is all the legs ever think about.
I raise my lap onto my toes a couple of inches and my legs start shaking. Maybe that will keep them quiet.
Red looks curiously at my lap.
But I submit, and I get up.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Home.’
‘What’s the matter – am I boring you?’
‘No, it’s not that. I just need to go home now, I gotta get over your tits.’
She bust a seam laughing.
‘Lay off them, they’re not available.’
‘Bullshit, they’re out to be handled, they want to be peeled and eaten with bare hands like mangos.’
‘So what? My tits are fabulous!’
‘I really have to be getting home.’
‘Are you waiting for the 55 bus?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’re going my way. Come back and wait with me.’
‘They just started a bus drivers strike.’
‘Oh, no! But I have all this shopping to carry!’
I shrug my shoulders and show her my palms.
‘Oh bugger, I’m going to have to walk home too.’
She sweeps up her bags and walks past me and I realise with irritation that I have to follow her. She looks over her shoulder and says, ‘Quick-sticks.’

I like to try and keep symmetry in my movements, some fluid, efficient action that at least feigns the composure that I want people to think I possess. But today I don’t feel quite right, and I’m all disjointed in my walk. We step into the blessed shade under the canopy of a busy cafe, where people spill onto the sidewalk like an ambush. I hate walking past groups of similarly dressed people; it makes me feel like I’m being strangled.
I find it very unsettling when something within my own system is not working. This at least I should be able to control, but I can feel it down there, in the nebula of my left thigh, a snag in the muscle that hampers its extension. This is just one of the many things I must put up with each day in my struggle to maintain equilibrium.
I try to push regularity into my legs, to push a beat into them. In walking I imagine that I’m moving with something that might be described as having a purpose.

We go by a table where a gaggle of simpering perfume counter dames are smooching their midday gins. With their gregarious mouths and painted faces, soft jowls wobbling under layers of concealer, they are truly frightful. They look up at us like we’re accomplices in a liaison and it electrocutes them. I could plunder their thoughts for a dirty novel. I skip past them, but Red lags behind, peering into the windows of a thrift shop.
‘Hey, I’m not stopping,’ I hiss back at her. I didn’t know I cared.
‘Look at these toys. They’re the old metal wind-up ones.’
I drag myself back.
‘They’re so cute,’ she says.
There are two of them. A bear with cymbals and a monkey with a drum. The bear wears a peaked cap and the monkey wears a fez. I can see Red’s bust in the window and I try to adjust my focus so I see the toys instead, but it’s near impossible.
‘I’m going to buy them!’ She claps, ‘come on!’
She hurries inside the shop, but I stay where I am. She gabbles to the man behind the counter who reaches into the window display and winks at me approvingly.
I raise my eyebrows back at him, and catch my own reflection. Some gestures are just too simian.
‘Look at the monkey! What a handsome little man, he is.’
I think for a moment that she’s talking about me, but she’s holding up the toy. He’s the most charming monkey I have ever seen. Painted in bright colours and bearing a sideways grin. She winds him up and puts him on the ground and he beats his sticks while his fez goes up and down, making a small cacophony of sound. I wind up the bear and he bangs his cymbals enthusiastically, moving his head from side to side. We both laugh and the ladies at the table look over at us, startled like fowl with the wind up them.
‘They’re bloody fantastic,’ I say.
‘You can have the bear, I love the monkey too much.’
I’m quite surprised. This is an unexpected gesture.
‘No, I can’t take it.’
‘Of course you can.’
I look at the bear. Look at him.
‘Alright, then. I will.’

We resume walking and suddenly I feel great. I test my legs and I feel like I can run if I want to.
‘You’re walking too fast,’ she cries, ‘hold up!’
But I can’t stop. There I was thinking that today was unspectacular, that I was a lame duck, half-cocked and with nothing loaded, and then, just as I want to hide from it all… Somebody gives me a bear! And everything turns out great!
And the two ravens ruffling on the powerlines tell me so.
‘Ahh, there goes an exception,’ they say, ‘Ahh…’
The grasps of several ghouls loosen their grip upon me and detach. I feel lighter! I can straighten my back. I’m positive as a beacon. I begin to feel easy and unencumbered. I fall into a smooth, winsome gait and suddenly find a popular song has crept into my head. I start whistling and Red remarks, ‘you’ve suddenly come around.’
‘I think my day’s just started.’
‘Hang on a minute, I just remembered something,’ she says, and puts her bags down. From her handbag she pulls out a safety pin and a piece of paper, pricking a hole in it. She urges me to crouch down and there on the ground between our feet, the eclipse is revealed.
‘You can’t look at the sun or you’ll go blind,’ she whispers.
‘I know that already.’ We watch it for a little while, the diminishing belly of the sun.

All around us as we step into the park, the trees are under a spell that draws our attention. In my vision, everything is placed deliberately like objects in a diorama; as trees gesture in front of parked cars and houses, and people move around like pieces on a board. Above the rooftops, cumulus clouds billow upon an enormous, blue partition. There is an overwhelming amount of blue sky in this country.
I see a person up ahead of us and my sharp cartographer’s eye can discern the lines that fix her in place. I imagine that I can slip my hand under the lip of her outline, and grasp the webbing that holds the world into place. I imagine I can close my fist to distort this section of the universe. It would be like pulling a sheet off a bed.
‘How spooky is it?’ She whispers.
‘Someone’s taken half the light out of the day.’
I look at her and she is perfect. Everything about her has an uncanny shape, and I can measure the distance between her and the tree behind her. I spot feathers snagged in the grass that hem the path. Then I see an image of the park, all lit up by the weird sun that brings colour to everything, and a vision of an eternal light travelling through dark space and nothing to catch in it.
‘Everything looks so strange,’ she says, looking around, ‘this must be the moment when our superstitions were made.’

We walk along the driveway through the park, past a young woman sunbathing with her dog. She stands up to shake grass off her crocheted rug. Through the thousands of holes in the rug, the eclipse falls upon the ground like thousands of little crescents; the barking dog runs around in circles.
‘This is where we depart, I’m afraid,’ Red says, ‘I live up that way.’
She points with her chin in the opposite direction to where we were heading.
‘Thank you for the walk.’
‘Thank you for the bear. Do you mind if I ask you a question? Do you always wear red?’
‘No, just some of the time. I think I’m going to change my clothes when I get home.’
‘Oh, ok. I thought it was your look.’
‘You’re wearing all blue.’
I look down in surprise at my blue t-shirt, blue jeans and blue runners.
She smirks and spins around. I think about getting her number, but she’s already started away, her pumps sinking into the ground, so she steps out of them and walks off in bare feet.

On the earth, directly under the moon’s shadow, avid cosmologists quiver with pleasure as they see through their telescopes solar flares escaping over the rim of the moon, like schoolboys who go to ruin over the glimpse of aureole.
I wonder if someone hadn’t taken notes and written books about things, what it would be exactly, that I would know anything about. And if stories weren’t perpetuated, handled a hundred times from one person to the next, passing the memories that act as the tenuous links that bond us in our friendships and families, what would these people who come and go in my life really mean to me? I wonder how many times I will think of Red over the next few days.
I don’t even know what her name is.

The innocuous day slips aside; another turn of formality made in perpetuation. But something about me has changed for the better, and I’m feeling upbeat. As I approach home, I see my neighbour watering her roses. We raise our hands at each other, and I feel it there, the place that I leave open for a little company, open for the myriad forces that must act to move the vector, that urges the encounter. And the bear and I go into my cool house, out of the glare of the strange sun.

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Tags:

dac, eclipse, hop, short, solar and story